CREATIVE CAPITAL AWARDS $4,370,000 TO 46 DIVERSE PROJECTS Awards in Literature, Performing Arts and Emerging Fields Include Works Focused on Criminal Justice, Immigration, Racial Justice and Climate Change; Projects to Receive Nearly $100,000 Each in Support New York, NY (January 12, 2016) – Pioneering artist support organization Creative Capital has announced its 2016 awardees, funding 46 projects selected from a nationwide pool of 2,500 proposals. The artistic disciplines being funded this year are: Literature, Performing Arts and Emerging Fields. Drawing on venture- capital principles, Creative Capital seeks out artists’ projects that are bold, innovative and genre-stretching, then surrounds those artists with the tools they need to realize their visions and build sustainable careers. The 2016 Creative Capital awardees are an incredible group of creative thinkers, representing 63 artists at all stages of their careers with an age range of 28 to 65 years old. More than half are women; and more than half identify as people of color. Each funded project will receive up to $50,000 in direct funding and additional resources and advisory services—such as financial consulting and communications support— valued at $45,000, making the organization’s total 2016 investment more than $4,370,000. Many of these projects reflect Creative Capital’s commitment to artist-activists, who are engaging some of the most significant and hotly debated issues of our time. Projects receiving funding span a wide range of genres and forms, including an exhibition and book on the histories of transgender communities, an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea as a Latin American variety show, and an opera examining America’s relationship with guns. “Artists today are brave, bold and deeply engaged in the world,” said Ruby Lerner, Founding President & Executive Director, Creative Capital. “The 2016 class of Creative Capital awardees are creating important and deeply moving work, with immediacy and passion. This class is diverse, it is extraordinarily talented, and we believe the 2016 Creative Capital artists will shape their fields for decades to come.” “Creative Capital is without a doubt the pre-eminent grant making organization for artists today,” said Joel Wachs, President, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “The 2016 class shows the breadth and ambition of Creative Capital and of the arts community, which is more diverse and daring than ever.” See below for a full list of 2016 recipients and projects, plus details on the selection process. LITERATURE: Poetry, fiction, non-fiction and web-based work are among the six selected projects, including new takes on immigration, memoir and the book as authoritative object. Jesse Ball, Chicago, IL Project: The Census Taker, a travel-narrative following a retired doctor traveling door-to-door with his adult Down Syndrome son. desveladas (Macarena Hernández, Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario), Brooklyn, NY Project: desveladas: a fotoconversation, which borrows from the narrative elements of the graphic novel to explore the border encounters of three over-documented daughters of the Americas. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, New York, NY Project: Global Studies, a collection of poems and flash prose that mimes the textbook structure to examine the ambiguity of history. Percival Everett, South Pasadena, CA Project: The Trusted Story, an experimental novel that questions the authority of the book, the text, the author and the reader. Eileen Myles, New York, NY Project: My Travels, a series of linked travel essays that tell the author’s life story through specific experiences in Boston, New York, India, Russia and Ireland. Dao Strom, Portland, OR Project: Postwar Tablefruit, a hybrid memoir that juxtaposes prose and visual elements to articulate silences, survival, shadows and the obscuring of history. EMERGING FIELDS: The 17 selected projects cover a wide-range of “emerging” practices, including technology-based work, social practice and interdisciplinary work. They address a range of issues and ideas including climate change, the preservation of American history, and the commodification of human DNA. Tanya Aguiñiga, Los Angeles, CA Project: Casa de Cambio/House of Change, a center for art creation and dissemination based in a repurposed storefront at the U.S./Mexico border crossing. Zach Blas, Brooklyn, NY Project: Contra-Internet, a multimedia installation that engages emerging political militancies and artistic subversions of the Internet. Peter Burr and Porpentine, Brooklyn, NY and Oakland, CA Project: Aria End, a digital artwork that draws on video game design to immerse participants in a disorienting narrative that unfolds through both downloadable content and public performances. Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo and Sable Elyse Smith, Brooklyn, NY Project: Mirror / Echo / Tilt, a collaboration with formerly incarcerated people that uses magical realism to investigate representations of criminalized black and brown bodies. desert ArtLAB (April Bojorquez and Matt Garcia), Pueblo, CO Project: Desertification Cookbook: Strategies for Beautiful Living in a Dryer, Hotter World, a manual that will instruct on both the cultivation and preparation of a desert-based food practice. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Chicago, IL Project: Sell/Bio, a multidisciplinary investigation of the ethically controversial and largely unregulated practice of extracting and selling human DNA. 2 Liz Glynn, Los Angeles, CA Project: Gol[den], a monumental installation based in a foreclosed home in Southern California that explores pleasure, quality of life and income inequality through participatory events. Heather Hart and Jina Valentine, Brooklyn, NY and Durham, NC Project: The Black Lunch Table, which provides sites where Black cultural producers can engage in critical dialogue on topics directly affecting the Black community. Marisa Morán Jahn, New York, NY Project: Video Slink Uganda, a collaboration with three superstar VJs in Uganda to insert artwork into bootleg DVDs shown in Ugandan video halls. KCHUNG, Los Angeles, CA Project: News Body, a mobile, roving broadcast that brings live interviews, reporting and production training by KCHUNG’s cooperative content producers to any location in Southern California. Yotam Mann, Brooklyn, NY Project: Interactive Music, a collection of interactive musical experiences in the form of browser-based songs, musical installations and a collaborative concert. Eva and Franco Mattes, Brooklyn, NY Project: Fukushima Texture Pack, a publicly-accessible collection of surface textures based on photographs taken in the radioactive Fukushima Exclusion Zone. Irvin Morazan, Richmond, VA Project: Silent Zoomorph is a performance series consisting of fictionalized rituals and wearable sculptures that will be activated in art galleries, burial sites, temples, places of natural phenomenon and a radioactive desert. Laura Parnes, Brooklyn, NY Project: Tour Without End, a multi-platform project resulting in a film, video installation and web-based archive of local musicians and venues in New York City. Kenya (Robinson), Gainesville, FL Project: CHEEKY LaSHAE: Karaoke Universal, which uses the structure of an online course to perforate the boundaries between audience and performer, evoking the history of drag performance, puppetry, model- making and social media. Evan Roth, Paris, France Project: Voices Over the Horizon, a paranormal investigation, utilizing ghost hunting technologies and rituals, into the invisible existence of the Internet. Chris E. Vargas, Bellingham, WA Project: Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects, a visual and material exploration of objects that hold significance in narrating the history of transgender communities. 3 PERFORMING ARTS: The 23 funded projects draw on a wide array of performance practices and ideas, including tragic operas, the criminal justice system, Greek mythology, the sounds of fracking, and the body as instrument. Cornell Alston and Kaneza Schaal, New York, NY Project: KNOTS, a performance of psychological, social and political entanglements that explores the conundrums citizens face when re-entering society after incarceration. Jeff Becker, New Orleans, LA Project: Sea of Common Catastrophe, a multi-media performance event, inspired by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that explores resilience amidst the turbulent community change caused by a catastrophic flood. Peter Born and Okwui Okpokwasili, Brooklyn, NY Project: Poor People's TV Room, a multi-disciplinary performance piece that investigates the tradition of women’s collective action in Nigeria. Ligia Bouton, Matt Donovan and Lei Liang, San Diego, CA Project: Inheritance, a multimedia chamber opera that explores America’s deeply complex relationship with violence and guns through the life and legacy of Sarah Winchester, heir to the gun-manufacturer fortune. Sharon Bridgforth, San Francisco, CA Project: dat Black Mermaid Man Lady, a series of writing workshops, tarot readings and storytelling gatherings based in a tiny house, built for the project, in a San Francisco neighborhood facing gentrification. Ben Thorp Brown, Brooklyn, NY Project: Freedom From Everything, an archive, video work and performance investigating the practices and economics of contemporary forms of labor, including digital labor and crowdsourcing. Ann Carlson, Santa Monica, CA Project: The Symphonic Body, a performance by people from any workplace or institution made entirely of gestures based on the motions of their workday. Mallory Catlett, New York, NY Project: